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Dora bent down and ran a probing finger along the pipe at the back of Samantha McCloud's lavatory. It was astounding what you could discover about people from a quick inspection of their smallest room. Dora should know; she had been inspecting them for years. Other people claimed that book or record collections revealed character, but Dora doubted it. Young women like Samantha McCloud, she suspected, would be careful in their choice of such items, picking them out as mere accessories to their lifestyle. Dora preferred the lavatory technique.
She retracted her finger and peered at it. It was worse than she'd thought not a speck of dust, let alone grime. Either this woman had a highly efficient cleaning lady — which she doubted, since no such creature existed — or Samantha McCloud really was the paragon that Brian made her out to be.
He had taken her on three weeks ago, when dear old Mrs Harris retired. Dora had approved of Mrs Harris, who had been Brian's secretary for almost ten years. She had considered him safe in Mrs Harris’ ageing hands. Brian had complained endlessly about her lack of efficiency, of course, but that was the price he had to pay for a peaceful marriage.
But then the new broom had arrived.
She called herself Sam, of course. All these young women had thrusting, genderless names nowadays, to match their tailored trouser suits and degrees in business studies. In her day, secretaries had done a six month course in shorthand and typing and got on with it, but nowadays they presided over computers powerful enough to launch rockets to the moon.
Her inspection over, Dora returned to the overheated living room. As dinner parties went, this one could hardly be counted a roaring success. Brian had been trying to keep his eye off Sam's skillfully contrived bosom all night, and failed. He had drunk too much as usual, and had been dragging out his stories about patients' erotic fantasies, a subject he liked to dwell on longer than was appropriate for a practising psychiatrist, at least in Dora's opinion. It was evidently a view shared by Sam's partner, a trendy accountant from Slough, judging by his tight-lipped expression.
The food had been faultless, of course, the dining table all elegant perfection. But she had been expecting that. Dora longed to wander around the house freely, to probe the insides of drawers and cupboards, to hunt for wrinkles on beds. Know thine enemy was her motto. Sam McCloud had a weak spot, and Dora intended to find it. She suspected that she knew her husband's only too well.
It was over a decade since Brian had rocked their marriage by having an affair with his secretary — a smooth-haired creature with formidable shorthand who called herself Jo. The affair, his only one to her knowledge, had rocked their marriage severely. But Dora had forgiven him eventually, and relaxed her guard once he had employed the ageing Mrs Harris. But now her guard was well and truly up again.
The diners had moved from the table to the subtly lit seating area, where Brian's stories were going from bad to worse. He sat thigh to thigh on the sofa with Sam, the perfect secretary, moving guiltily away a fraction when he saw Dora enter the room. Sam McCloud got up from the sofa at the same moment, but unhurriedly, as if she had been intending to move, all along.
'I'll make some coffee,' she said, in a voice which held no trace of an accent to identify her origins. She could have come from anywhere — indeed, Dora sometimes speculated that such women were not born, but simply materialised, perfectly turned out, at the age of twenty-six or so.
'Let me help you.' Dora had heard the tale of the Somerset sheep shagger once too often, and in any event, she wanted to see the inside of Sam’s kitchen. Sam demurred, but was too polite to decline the offer of help when it was repeated, firmly.
The first thing that caught Dora's eye in the kitchen depressed her further. A hand-written note sellotaped to the gleaming freezer listed its contents. Three or four items had been scored through — heaven help her — with the aid of a ruler. Dora now knew that she was dealing with a demon on the domestic front. Even after years of domestic training, Dora could not name the precise contents of her freezer, in spite of its bi-monthly defrost.
She watched as Sam McCloud piled coffee cups onto a tray with practised ease. 'Brian's been singing your praises endlessly,' she told Sam with narrowed eyes. Shouting them from the rooftops was more like it. 'And I can see that he wasn't exaggerating. You look superbly organised.'
'Yes,' said Sam inscrutably. 'I like to keep my affairs in order.'
In the car on the way home, Brian, buoyed up by one post-dinner brandy too many, made an ill-judged attempt at conversation.
'So what did you make of Sam?' he asked. 'Isn't she perfect? I hardly recognise my own office these days, I can tell you.
'I suspect she's anally retentive,' Dora said, proud of her ability to bandy around Freudian terms in spite of all her years away from nursing. It was on the acute psychiatric ward that she had met Brian over thirty years ago. In training then, he had been the victim of an unpleasant incident involving a schizophrenic whose dosage he had miscalculated. In the patient's canteen, the crazed psychotic had stabbed Brian in the buttock with a fork. Happily, Dora had been on the spot to tend to his injuries, and the rest was history. The tale of their first meeting was one that Brian liked to air at dinner parties indeed, he had done so this very evening although nowadays Dora insisted that he replace the offending word buttock, with leg.
'Anal retentive, hah! ' Brian sank back into the passenger seat with an air of satisfaction. 'Excellent quality in a secretary. Mrs Harris could have done with more anal retentiveness, if you ask me. All those scrappy notes on the backs of envelopes, and leaky biros. Lord, I don't know how I stood it all those years. Thank heavens for the new broom, eh?'
Dora didn't deign to reply, but Brian hadn't finished yet. 'A bit easier on the eye than Mrs Harris, too,' he said, his judgement clearly gone completely. 'The old gal was actually beginning to sprout whiskers. ' Dora glared at him, and he recomposed his features swiftly. 'Poor dear,' he added in a more subdued tone.
'Yes, well I'm sure Miss McCloud will keep her whiskers under control,' Dora said briskly, swinging the car into the well-tended driveway of their executive detached.
The following morning, Dora was up bright and early, sorting out her chest freezer. She noted the contents, then typed up a list, which she sellotaped carefully on the top of the freezer. She ran little scenarios through her head in which she maneuvered Sam McCloud into her utility room under the pretext of showing off her geraniums. There, Sam's crestfallen eye would fall immediately upon Dora's typewritten list, so much more professional than her own hand-written one.
She employed the rest of the day happily, giving the tops of wardrobes a jolly good spring clean. At four-thirty precisely, the phone rang. Dora's head span. Brian always rang at four-thirty if he was going to be late, but he was rarely late nowadays. Due to Dora's insistence on punctuality for the evening meal, it would take nothing less than a suddenly-called national train strike, or a terrorist attack on the Piccadilly Line to alter his routine. Patients never infringed on his time out of office hours these days. Since moving up the professional ladder, he no longer dealt with manic depressives or schizophrenics individuals liable to develop crises at unpredictable times. His patients nowadays were a touch neurotic, a shade depressed, just ill enough to justify his fees, but not to inconvenience him.
Dora picked up the phone apprehensively. 'The Beckett household. Can I help you?'
'Ah, Dora. Thought I'd better warn you I'll be late tonight. Something's developed. Sam's discovered a few inconsistencies in our accounting system and wants to run through it with me. She reckons she could save us hundreds. Poor Mrs Harris really didn't have her finger on the pulse.'
'That's as may be,' Dora said repressively. 'But I've just put the pork chop casserole on, and you said you'd fix the window in the utility room tonight. The one that raffles.'
'And so I will, my love, just as soon as I get home.'
The line went dead, and Dora gritted her teeth. This was how it had all started last time, she remembered. Late nights at the office, urgent conferences with his secretary. She thought back to the bleak days of reheated casseroles, and shuddered.
Brian finally returned at ten o'clock, clearly on a high from the hours he had spent with his secretary. He claimed that his good mood was the result of Sam's rigorous overhaul of his billing system, though Dora suspected that it was Brian himself who had been the subject of a rigorous going over.
'I gave our bank statements a rigorous overhaul while I was waiting for you,' she said pointedly. 'I think the bank charged us too much interest last month.'
'Well spotted, love,' Brian said vaguely, his mind clearly elsewhere.
Later, as good as his word, he trotted off to repair the utility room window. He returned half an hour later with a piece of white paper flapping from the soul of his shoe.
'What on earth's this?' he said, peeling the sticky paper from his shoe. Pork chops four, crossed out, two. Bird's Eye spinach, one packet . . . Is this some kind of a shopping list, love?'
'Give that to me,' Dora said crossly, snatching the crumpled paper from his hand. 'That's my freezer list. How in the world did it get on your shoe?'
'Ah. I had to climb onto the freezer to get at the window,' Brian said, abashed. 'There may be a few, ah, footprints, you know.'
Dora subdued the urge to rush out to find cloths and cleaning fluids.
'Wwhat's all this about freezer lists, anyway?' Brian asked, clutching at his receded hairline. 'You never had one of those before. Not like you to make changes, Dora. Seems like a bit of a funny idea, to me.'
'Sam McCloud has a freezer list,' Dora ground out. 'But I suppose in her case you'd put it down to her superb organisational skills.'
'Ah, well .
'She's over-zealous, that's all I know,' Dora hinted darkly. 'I've seen the signs.'
'Such as?' Brian looked genuinely interested, but since Dora could hardly admit that she had inspected the rear of Sam's lavatory, she had to leave the conversation there.
The following day, at precisely four-thirty, Brian rang. He'd be late. 'Sam's decided to colour code my periodicals,' he told Dora excitedly. 'I have to be there to oversee the process, or apparently I'll never find anything again.'
'Then what's the point of doing it?' Dora snorted.
'Efficiency, my dear, efficiency.'
Furious, Dora stormed around the house trying to find something of Brian’s to colour code. She rejected socks and Y-fronts, which were mostly grey or brown anyway, and settled on ties. She rearranged the ties on his racks along the colour spectrum, a task which took over two hours. A multi-coloured stripy tie, one of his favourites, defied colour analysis, and had be ruthlessly sacrificed in the interests of Progress.
Predictably, the following morning, it was precisely that tie that Brian wanted to wear. 'Something funny’s happened to my ties,' he complained.
'I colour coded them,' Dora said. 'And since you weren't there to oversee the process, naturally you can't find anything. ' She explained why the stripy tie had to go, and Brian was not amused.
'It didn't fit into any category,' Dora defended herself. 'Not blue, not red, not green. What was I to do?'
'Sam McCloud would have invented a new category,' Brian said furiously. 'A category for ties that have no category.'
A new category. Dora pondered his words in despair. Clearly, the woman was an evil genius.
Her suspicions of an affair grew. Brian whistled to himself in the bathroom in the mornings. There were times when he looked almost happy. On Wednesday night, he stayed late, ostensibly to help Sam purge his old files. On Thursday, he claimed, they rearranged his bookshelves. By Friday, he looked desperately tired. It was all horribly familiar.
Dora decided to take desperate action. She would offer Brian her body. Since sex no longer played a dominant role in their marriage, Brian normally fell upon her with utter gratitude if she showed willing. Dora's idea of pleasurable physical contact nowadays was that of her hand curling around a good book, but she decided to make the ultimate sacrifice. In bed, Brian turned away from her beckoning body and switched off the light. 'Not tonight, love,' he groaned. 'It's been a very tiring week. Sam's completely worn me out.'
The late nights at the office continued Dora ate lonely suppers in the kitchen and cleaned obsessively. Brian looked more exhausted with every day that passed, and she checked his life insurance policies. The old fool was tangling with a woman half his age, with thighs that could crack nuts. It could only be a matter of time before something gave out.
He no longer talked about Sam unless prompted, a symptom she also recognised from his previous affair. Once, unable to prevent herself, she dared to wonder aloud why, if Sam was so efficient, he had to work such long hours.
'I expect it's just a temporary phase,' Brian said confusedly, falling upon his reheated cod with gusto. 'It's all down to percentages, you see. Sam reckons that she can have me performing at fifteen per cent greater efficiency by the end of the quarter with a target of twenty percent by the end of the year. It's a question of mopping up the idle minutes here and there, apparently. She gives me a printed computer sheet every morning, detailing my every movement for the day.'
Sam McCloud knew a thing or two about handling men, she'd grant her that. Dora toyed with the idea of trying to improve Brian's performance around the house and garden, but rejected the idea as unworkable. She visualised Sam's computer list, with its half hour time slots. 6.30 - 8.3OPM NOOKIE WITH SECRETARY it read in bold print, underlined.
'Very organised of her, I'm sure,' she sniffed.
'She's organised all right,' Brian agreed. 'I won't argue with you there. She reads fat books on the subject. Time Management. They can tell you a thing or two about efficiency, apparently.
Dora knew nothing about Time Management, but determined to put it on her reading list. Later that week, she received strange looks from a librarian who for twenty years had been seeking out the latest Barbara Cartland for her.
A week elapsed. Brian could barely stagger out of bed in the mornings. On Friday afternoon, Dora decided to tackle the garden. She disliked gardening, with its variables like frost and drought and pests, and flowers which a had a tendency to bloom at inconvenient moments, but it had to be done. She was pulling bindweed out with some vigour when she looked up and saw her husband approaching her across the vegetable patch.
'Brian! ' she gasped, on three counts. Firstly, it was only three o'clock. Secondly, he was smiling. And thirdly, as he drew nearer, it was clear from the state of his breath that he had been drinking.
The moment had come. Brian was going to leave her. He couldn't possibly look that happy for any other reason. She was about to be replaced by a younger, more efficient model. Soon, he would be packing his bags — no, she would have to pack them for him. Brian never knew where anything was.
'There's no need to look so happy about it,' she said reprovingly, thinking he was looking uncommonly fatuous for a man who had just manoeuvred his wife into packing his bags for him.
'I'm sorry'. He sought to straighten his lips. 'I know I shouldn't look so pleased about it. You've guessed, I can see. It wasn't an easy decision, Dora, but on balance, I think this is best for all parties.'
'Better for Sam McCloud,' Dora muttered.
'Yes. Yes, I really think so. And for me too, of course.'
'Of course.
'And you'll benefit too, Dora my love. No more waiting up to reheat casseroles, eh?'
'I'd hardly count that as a benefit.' Dora said sourly, though actually, he had a point.
Brian had that familiar look on his face, the one when he could barely conceal his guilty glee.
'I didn't want it to come to this of course,' he said. 'Most regrettable.' (Looking not the least regretful). 'Still, she's gone now.
'Gone?' Dora's mind did a double-take. 'What do you mean, gone?'
But before he spoke, she knew the answer. Sam had to move out of his office before he could move into her bed. He was bound by his code of ethics, something like that. Or did that just apply to fraternising with patients? She was unsure.
'She's gone!' Brian shouted with jubilation. 'Moved on. Packed her bags. I'm sorry, Dora, I know I shouldn't crow, but a man can only take so much. She'd started scheduling so-called comfort breaks for me during the day. Two minutes. I tried to negotiate for three, but she wasn't having any. I swear she was rationing my coffee intake so I wouldn't have to take a leak out of schedule.'
Dora felt a new respect for Sam McCloud, remembering all the times Brian had disappeared to the bathroom for ten minutes just as the asparagus was done to perfection.
'Oh happy day!' Brian did a silly little jig around the onion patch. 'I'm going out on Monday to look for a secretary who writes with leaky biros on the backs of envelopes. Let's go mad tonight, Dora. Let's have an evening of utter depravity. Let's eat our tea off our knees on the sofa.'
'Sofa?' Dora echoed faintly.
'To hell with the crumbs,' Brian said recklessly. 'And let's leave the washing up until morning. I feel the need to break out of the mould.'
'It's that woman who's done this to you,' Dora said severely. 'Turning your head, making you say wild things. It’s just reaction, Brian, you'll soon settle down again.'
'You were right about her all along,' Brian said generously. 'I can't deny it.'
'Yes, said Dora, secretly pleased that he wasn't leaving her, after all. 'I always knew she was trouble, that one, from the first time I saw the inside of her smallest room.’
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